Apparition Miracle
by Losselen
Summary: the purpose of a translation is not to preserve a meaning - RemusSirius


**Apparition Miracle**

"The translator knows that nothing the poet has ever said or written  
reveals as much about him as the expression on his face when he  
was asked to pose for a picture. He greets posterity with a devilish  
grin. To the translator's delight, he's forced to repeat the gesture at  
least three or four times. The camera has no film."  
-Mónica de la Torre

They see themselves creep across the river like iced- rood-undergrowth, something strange about the way they walk, so tender and careful with each step, _so_ light they become shivers of afterimages in the night.

But they never think twice about seeing the illusory facsimiles of themselves.

The truth is, Remus is looking for the foreimage, the warning, harbinger of the storm.

Sirius scoffs at him, a wicked mock laughing at Remus's inability to comprehend. He knows of not-looking, not-seeing, faith in the unseen and the sphinxian and the sight of sightless. Remus doesn't believe in the trajectory Providence makes, cycloidlike and misfolded, but Sirius's eyes gleam in the side-light with an understanding of divine destiny. He is leaning against the sill, dusk cloaked, the sun sharp on his jaw as he waits there.

There is nothing in the glass.

But Sirius sees the not-seeing in the air, the illumined clinking of ice in his glass. He raises his hand and toasts, a response to a past conversation already forgotten, says: "Salute, brother. Maybe we'll meet again before the end." Remus knows who he is talking to, standing by the door and intruding the rite, something sparkling crystal-like and blinding his eyes.

Brilliance.

Brilliance on legs. Remus laughs.

He is aware of an ambiguous difference between brilliance and wisdom, between sweetness and lonesomeness.

And Sirius would have resented it, to be called a brash genius. Besides, Remus wanted to keep it to himself, unknown to the rest of the world a truth, unpolished maybe and rude maybe, but his.

He dreams about things he cannot understand. Absurd, he knows. Except he keeps on seeing a wedding in them. Sun-day. Bright and perfect the way Hollywood looks on American Muggle television with blueskies and palm trees. It's always that imagined perpetual warmth Remus dreams about. No haunting, no echoes, this place doesn't afford for _The Secret Sharer_ and the darkness of the Old World. It is a splay of overhued colors across the electric network, buzz-buzz-buzzing and it fools him every time. The wedding goes with lilies of the valley and laced tablecloths, he slips into the dress room to see the red-haired princess but finds Sirius there, profiled against the gold-light from the window, half-dark and half-brilliant.

Saying: "Salute, brother."

And then walking past Remus, brushing past him, Remus smells his scent and it's obscenely beautiful.

When he wakes up, he doesn't remember.

Except there are instances of recognition, half-realized, half-crazed, electric revelation that jolts through his body and disappears instantly. In the wedding aisle there plays not the regal organ but a lighthearted beat. It's like an almost-dance, Remus walking down it in black clothes so gingerly as not to break the silence, because no one is sitting on the benches anyway.

He wakes up all damp, panicked, sundered. There is only one instant of lucidity.

The other parts of it is lost, during translation into the Language of the Wakeful. There are no words for this kind of dream in this side of the world, Remus's dictionary goes from new to dog-earred, but his notepad is blank except for one word: _wild_.

Thus it is in dreams that Remus discovers his impermanence. Something he sees with his own eyes in the transparent quality about his arms in the harsher light. He's caught off guard: they way you are waking from a sleepless sleep: the shattering, the whirling. Pale; lurid; not-there-reflection so bright he narrow his eyes into paler flickers of lashes in-light. He can see the blood underneath. His fingers are too ashen, too sharp, he sees white shadows when he closes his eyes. He can push away the door. There is some indignity in that, passive-crawl humming and thrumming: something he sees inside his body that cannot be washed away.

It is not this impermanence that he fears, but rather, the rising feeling that he will never be understood.

Sirius is a (_the_) translator, although he's never told Remus and doesn't own a name tag.

Remus remembers that in the dream Sirius wears a black-and-white three piece with pseudo-Victorian ruffles and there is a silliness in his Spheniscan kisses and it makes Remus laugh. He sounds young to himself and it surprises him.

Nothing lost this time, he remembers the littlest of details, even though he doesn't remember seeing.

HE LEARNS TO DISCARD DREAMS, REMINDED OF SOMETHING ALIVE. SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL.

Remus finally wakes and realizes: seeing is unimportant. The purpose of a translation is not to preserve a meaning just as the purpose of wakefulness is not to preserve the events of a dream, but to find newness.


End file.
